The recent explosion of distributed computing systems and their attendant problems have led to many innovative solutions to ensure commonality, interoperability, and standardization. In order to both provide authorized access and prevent unwanted access, administrators establish policies for distributed computing systems under their control. These policies include firewall policies, file access policies, application-related policies, encryption policies, audit trail policies, activity logging policies, etc.
Unfortunately, if any particular computer in the aforementioned distributed computing system is not compliant with any particular desired policy, the remaining computers in the system may be detrimentally affected. Such affects may range from security-related problems to more benign issues such as performance reduction, inconvenience, etc.
There is thus a need for overcoming these and/or other problems associated with the prior art.